


Skin is just a ready made coffin

by ulittuq



Category: Naruto
Genre: BAMF Haruno Sakura, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Haruno Sakura-centric, How Many Ways Can I Make Haruno Sakura Suffer: the fic, Konoha may be the nice village but it's still messed up, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Slow To Update, Uchiha Massacre, bc author is bad at time managment, but first let's give her a messed up childhood, but what naruto character isn't, don't go into detail but it's mentioned, gonna be a few bloody deaths and Sakura is traumatized, sakura's gonna be a bamf eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-17 10:30:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15459369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ulittuq/pseuds/ulittuq
Summary: The night of the Uchiha Massacre is chaos. Alarms are blaring and shinobi are flying through the street and somewhere Sasuke Uchiha is waking up from seventy-two hours of psychological torture courtesy of his big brother.Sakura Haruno hides under her bed with her hands clasped over her mouth trying to stifle her breathing and praying that the stranger prowling her house can’t hear her heartbeat.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> me: i'm already working on a fic that i haven't updated in months  
> me: let's start another one
> 
> it doesn't really affect the story too much but i'm changing around the timeline a lil but bc let's face it, the naruto timeline makes no sense. basically i'm just moving it up a bit so kids start the Academy at eight, six to eight is general education where kids are taught things like reading and writing and math and a little history, and before six guardians are expected to teach their kids basic skills. so the Uchiha Massacre happens when the Rookie Nine are eight.

The entire Uchiha clan save for Sasuke is killed in one night. They lay in their homes, in the streets of their compound, with empty eye sockets and mouths open in shock. The police force is dead and shinobi are scrambling and a man decides to take a chance.

He’s really more of a boy and desperate in ways only someone on the brink of losing everything can be. He chooses a house on the edge of the civilian district, close enough to the Underground that he can disappear into back alleys and brothels quickly.

He thumbs the edge of the stolen kunai--too dull to be an effective throwing weapon but capable of splitting flesh with enough force--and takes a breath. He’s never taken a life unnecessarily but--this is _necessary_ , he reminds himself. So what if a few faceless civilians die for what he needs?

He dredges up memories people of passing him in the street with disdain in their eyes and a sneer on their lips. Of parents tugging their children away from him. He remembers his mother, her skin pallid under the flush of fever, eyes shining bright and unfocused. It’s just the flu spiraling out of control, she just needs medicine, but these goddamn _selfish_ villagers don’t care about the suffering of the homeless.

He takes all his grief and rage and lets it steady his hand.

 

Sakura had woken when the alarms started ringing but after five minutes of tense waiting, wondering if there was an invasion, they cut off. Her father made her a warm glass of milk and her mother tucked her in and they both kissed her goodnight on her forehead.

Sakura wakes again to a scream.

She jolts out of bed, nearly tripping over her blankets. She scrambles towards the door. The scream, high enough to only be her mother’s, had come from downstairs.

She eases the door open and creeps into the hallway, straining her ears.

“I am sorry,” a strange voice says. “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have to.”

“Fuck you,” her mother half spits half sobs.

There’s the sound of a struggle, a scream cut off by a gurgle, then a wet thud.

Silence.

Sakura hurls herself into her room and wedges herself under the bed, huddled in the darkest corner farthest away from the door.

Footsteps. They climb the stairs and Sakura presses her hands against her mouth and nose, trying to keep her breath in.

The footsteps pause at her door. The floorboards creak and Sakura sees tattered sandals enter her room. The figure seems to look around then leaves.

Sakura lets out a shaky breath that sounds entirely too loud, but the footsteps continue to her parents’ room.

She doesn’t know how long she stays there, breath quick and silent, hands shaking because-- _oh god her parents are dead they’re dead dead dead--_ but eventually, the footsteps move back downstairs.

She waits and tries to listen for any sound other than her own heartbeat. After a long stretch of silence, Sakura crawls out and inches towards her door. She pauses again. The only sound in the entire house is her.

The first thing she sees while creeps down the stairs is the kitchen table. On it are cooling cups of tea and a small pitcher of milk.

Then she sees the bodies.

Her parents are slumped together on the floor in a pool of blood. The stench of it hangs so heavy in the air Sakura can taste it.

Later, Sakura will remember what happens next through a haze, as if she is remembering a dream. She will remember screaming, remember crying and sobbing and begging-- _come back please you can’t leave please please please--_ but it will feel as though it was not her who did those things. It was someone else in her body and she watched distantly.

Later, Sakura will rouse herself to the sound of her neighbor screaming. She will look up from where she’s curled against her parents’ cooling corpses, blood matting her hair and dried stiff on her skin.

Later, Sakura will be led to the hospital and then to a harried chunin acting as a police officer. She will tell him everything she knows and the chunin will promise they’ll catch whoever did this.

It isn’t until later that Sakura realizes he was lying.


	2. Chapter One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was gonna add this to the prologue and make it one chapter but it made more sense to split them up

Sakura is allowed to stay in the house partially due to her inheritance and partially due to how overrun the orphanage is because of the kyuubi attack. But living alone means supporting herself. Which means she can’t afford a proper funeral and burial for her parents, only cremation. 

Her parents' urns stare at her while she scrubs their blood from the floor.

 

She spreads her parents’ ashes in the Naka river. She stands in the cold water long after the currents has swept them away. 

Eventually, night falls and Sakura forces herself to move. She bends down to pluck her shoes from when she left them on the shore and something presses into the heel of her foot. An acorn. She picks it up on a whim, rolling the smooth shell between her fingers absentmindedly as she makes her way home. 

Suddenly an idea strikes her. There is no gravestone for her parents, no place to visit and grieve and remember them, but--

She looks down at the acorn in her hand.

Bark and branches and the cool shadow a tree offers is much more comforting than cold unmoving stone. 

Sakura knows she’s not expected back at the Academy until next week. But she spent three days in a house with the bloodstains she can’t get out no matter how hard she scrubs and a door to her parents’ room she refuses to open. 

She’s exhausted but too jittery to sleep through the days like she wants to and her mind feels full and empty and she hates the silence. 

(She needs to get better. All it took was one person with a kunai to take everything from her. She was useless, cowering under her bed, trembling as if she had a right to be scared while her parents were being murdered. She was useless and she needs to be better.)

So she goes to class, ignores Iruka-sensei’s concerned looks, smiles at Ino, and takes immaculate, neat notes on the trajectory on a kunai. Iruka-sensei takes one out to demonstrate, watching her carefully from the corner of his eye, and Sakura very deliberately shows nothing but attentiveness. 

Beneath the desk, her fingers curl to grip her thighs and thinks,  _ how dare he _ , and uses the anger to drown out the sound of flesh splitting for metal. 

 

During lunch, her classmates gossip in not-so-effective whispers about the Uchiha Massacre. They eye the empty seats, lingering on the only one that will ever be filled again. 

Part of Sakura is grateful they have something else to talk about but mostly she angry because  _ don’t they know that it wasn’t only the Uchiha that died that night, don’t they know not only Sasuke lost his family _ .

But her parents were civilians and Konoha is a Hidden Village. Civilians stitch clothes and grow food and build houses and civilians bleed and die but Konoha does not care. 

And Sakura resents. 

 

Ino is bright and cheerful and good. But Sakura is bitter and grieving and Ino’s friendship highlights how empty home is. 

So when Ino says she likes Sasuke, Sakura sees an opening. 

_ It’s better this way _ , she thinks and makes herself believe it. 

 

She makes it a week until she breaks down. She’s doing her homework and there’s a single question that she can’t make herself answer.

_ What is the most effective use of a kunai? _

Sakura knows what she should answer. She can even picture herself writing  _ throwing is the most effective use of a kunai _ but she can’t make herself do it.

Her parents were not murdered by a thrown kunai. 

She feels sweat gather on her upper lip and palms and the air suddenly feels too thick to pull into her lungs. 

Distantly, she realizes that this is a panic attack, this is trauma resurfacing, she has to control her breathing, but that seems impossible, there isn’t any air to breathe, oh god she can’t breathe, her head feels fuzzy, what’s happening, why can’t she breath--

Sakura comes back to herself with her forehead pressed to her desk. Her heart is racing but her lungs are working. She closes her eyes against the tears that want to form and counts her heartbeats to distract herself but she can still hear the wet squelch of the kunai sliding between her mother’s ribs or maybe slicing through her father’s neck or maybe being shoved through her mother’s eye and into her brain. 

Either way, her parents are dead and she is alone. 

She answers the question with  _ the most effective use of a kunai is throwing but it can be used as a short range weapon if necessary.  _

There is a small stipend given to orphans. It’s barely enough to live by and with bills to pay Sakura goes to bed hungry most days. It would be easier, she knows, if she moved out, but this house is where her parents lived and died and she can’t bring herself to leave it. 

She didn’t allow herself Ino, she can allow herself this. 

Sakura picks up odd jobs around the neighborhood, ones she’s given and paid more than she should be out of pity. She hates it, hates how people's’ eyes flick from her messily braided hair to her wrinkled clothes, hates how she sees the recognition in their eyes of  _ oh this is the Haruno girl _ . 

She hates it, but it’s useful. So she learns to hunch her shoulders and widen her eyes and scuff the ground with her foot as if she’s unsure. She lets them think she is alone and struggling and when they offer her food she hems and haws and simpers excuses until they insist. 

She doesn’t go hungry anymore. 

She’s called into Iruka-sensei’s office and told, gently but firmly, that she has to stop the odd jobs. Apparently, she taking D-ranks. Iruka-sensei's eyes are sympathetic and apologetic and Sakura wants to scream at him because he understands but does nothing. 

Instead, she acts flustered and apologizes profusely and promises to stop. 

After six days of careful rationing, her meager food supplies runs out. After two days of going to bed hungry, Sakura’s eyes drift toward the Underground. 

Sakura slips through the streets quietly, keeping near walls and veering away from the mouths of alleys. 

She slinks past bodies smaller than her huddled together and bodies with spines curved from age heaving through coughs and does her best to ignore the eyes following her. 

She passes three women smoking outside a brothel and the one with dark skin narrows her eyes.

“You there, girl,” she barks, “I haven’t seen you around.” The woman’s eyes flick from her bright hair and bright eyes, takes another drag and exhales smoke. “I would have remembered hair like that.” 

Sakura stiffens, then relaxes her posture and lifts her chin to meet the woman’s eyes. “I doubt you would have seen me before,” she says.

The woman throws back her head and laughs. “I like your spunk kid,” she says and something unreadable enters her eyes, “but I know you’re not from around here. Even if I hadn’t seen you, I would have heard about it.”

Sakura weighs her options and decides on the truth. “I’m looking for a job.” 

“You don’t wanna work here kid,” the woman says and Sakura agrees but it sounds too much like Iruka-sensei, eyes soft and understanding but unyielding. 

So Sakura raises an eyebrow and cocks her hip, challenge written in posture and eyes.

One of the other women who had been watching silently speaks up. Her voice is raspy and there’s a string of purple around her neck. “You’re too young to work in the rooms, Okami-san wouldn’t allow it. But,” she continues, chin slanted consideringly, “we might have a use for you.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another first chapter ended with Sakura getting a job
> 
> Okami, as far as i can find through google, means hostess, mistress, or landlady which is the closest thing i could find to the english word madam which is what the head of a brothel is called. pls correct me if i'm wrong

**Author's Note:**

> short n sweet prologue to get things started
> 
> this fic is gonna be a bit different from Avalanche. it's gonna be less in depth bc i can't handle trying to balance two long fics at the same time. this is probably gonna be just a couple chapters at most. 
> 
> i am working on Avalanche, just not linearly. i still haven't finished chapter five (though i'm getting close) but i'm also writing the wave arc and it's aftermath and the forest of death. i'm just jumping around to whatever catches my interest.


End file.
